from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. a fatal disease of sheep characterized by chronic itching and loss of muscular control and progressive degeneration of the central nervous system

Etymologies

From scrape (from the scraping of itching parts of the skin against objects).

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

From scrape +‎ -ie. (Wiktionary)

Examples

Although well-established in scrapie and, more recently, in BSE, comparatively little is known about the possibility of prion strains in chronic wasting disease (CWD), a disease affecting free ranging and captive cervids, primarily in North America.

However, to test the broader implications of our results, simulations carried out with different dominance assumptions (i.e. SL/RH genotypes are also susceptible to scrapie and have different lamb mortality rates than SL/SL genotypes) resulted in similar long-term scrapie persistence patterns, albeit for different ranges of model parameters.

BSE originated in the early 1980s when cattle were fed by-products from sheep suffering from a brain disease called scrapie, whose cause appears to be a chemically stable protein aggregate called a prion.

According to Richard Rhodes '"Deadly Feasts", all about the mutation of the disease called "scrapie" in sheep that became BSE in cows, then Creutzfeld-Jakob in humans, those unused brains and bones have been ground up and used in fertilizer as well as, at one time, cattle feed.

For many years after their discovery as the agents of some rare neurodegenerative diseases in mammals, such as scrapie in sheep and human Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru, prions have remained a truly esoteric research topic.

Other prion diseases, in animals, there is a disease of cattle called BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (commonly called mad cow disease), in sheep there is "scrapie" and in humans, there is GerstmannSträusslerScheinker syndrome (GSS), fatal familial insomnia (FFI) and kuru-kuru in humans in Papua New Guinea.

Prions, infectious proteins that carry diseases such as scrapie, chronic wasting disease and mad cow disease, have received the bulk of the attention since the wastewater plant began deciding whether to take the waste, but a variety of other substances could come through the high-heat, high-pressure chemical digester Cornell will use to liquefy 750,000 pounds per year of animal carcasses and infectious bedding.